City considers raising taxes

Tuesday

Two Salina City commissioners expressed support for considering whether to increase taxes following a extensive presentation on the city’s finances Monday evening.

Salina’s sales tax revenue is down 3.78 percent this year compared to 2018, and the commission is in the process of considering several multimillion dollar projects with a total price tag of $37.8 million.

City Manager Mike Schrage said the commission could still take on some of the projects if they are willing to raise taxes.

“I realize we have a long history of not raising the mill rate at all, or very incrementally,” he said. “But if you are, as a governing body, very committed to some of these projects, they are not out of reach. It’s a priority decision you are lucky enough to get to make.”

Schrage said several of the values, including the $9.5 million cost of cleaning up contamination at the former Schilling Air Force Base, were rough estimates of what the city might pay. Four local public entities and the federal government will decide how to divide the $95 million cost of the cleanup during upcoming legal negotiations.

Other major projects discussed by Schrage included:

• Emergency Communications System, $8 million

• Deferred Park Maintenance, $6 million

• Baseball Enterprises Proposal, $4 million

• General Fund Reserve Balance Goal, $4 million

• Kenwood Park/Expo Center Improvements, $3.3 million

• Tennis Complex Proposal, $1.5 million

• Pay Plan Review, $1.5 million

Commissioner Mike Hoppock said Salina’s property tax is low compared to similar cities in Kansas.

“As much as it’s important to the taxpayer that they don’t pay a lot of tax, we probably untaxed ourselves into this problem,” he said. “It’s like owning any type of property, at some point there is a day of reckoning and we’ve kind of run into that, I’m afraid. Now we’ve got to figure out how we are going to get out of it.”

Commissioner Karl Ryan said Salina will need to have good private and public schools and cultural assets to attract people to the community.

“We have to have the whole, complete package to offer,” he said. “Because we had so many partnerships in the past, we've been able to look past stepping up and creating the kind of fees that need to be there for us to compete in the marketplace.”

Ryan said the commission should consider raising taxes.

“It may be that by holding the mill levy low for so many years, we actually did a disservice to count on commercial growth,” he said. “It might be time to look at all the fees and consider what kind of community we really want to offer to central Kansas.”

Tennis project

Clark Renfro, a representative of the Salina Net Generation Group, which supports building a tennis complex at Kenwood Park, advocated for the project following the financial discussion. The group is proposing a public-private partnership for the project.

“We really feel that this is the time, the need, and the place to address this and put it in the top priority list,” he said.

Renfro said the current tennis courts at Oakdale, Jerry Ivey, and Sunset parks are in disrepair.

“There are crevices the size of a mini Grand Canyon in Oakdale and there are patches of grass the officials at Wimbledon would be proud of at Ivey court,” he said.

Renfro added the tennis complex would be a, “great gateway into downtown” that would offer a place for children to become better tennis players.

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